I was musing about our binary pkgs on ftp.NetBSD.org (and mirrors!) the
other day:
Right now, the situation WRT binary packages in large is:
* developers build & upload binary pkgs (which is good!)
* pkgsrc-releng moves vulnerable packages around (which is also good)
* there are several sets of binary packages for a number of
pkgsrc releases, operating systems, operating system versions and
hardware archirectures (which is actually the goal go provide)
* NetBSD's documented way of finding binary pkgs for OS X, Arch Y in
/pub/NetBSD/packages/X/Y is broken as the upload process is
non-working, and noone looks into fixing either the process or the
links (manually)
* Old sets of binary packages rot away.
1) Noone knows what the latest set of binaries for OS X, Version Y,
Arch Z is, let alone what pkgsrc version it is available from,
without looking.
2) Due to this, nuking all "old" binary pkgs may remove the last binary
pkgs for a non-popular platform
3) Mirrors run out of disk space due to this, leading to non-functional
mirrors.
What I'd like to see is to coordinate binary pkgs in the large:
* get an overview of what's there
* coordinate/talk with developers uploading binary pkgs
* make sure reality reflects NetBSD documentation (or vice versa)
Documentation in this place would be the examples in pkg_add.8,
pointing at /pub/NetBSD/packages/$OS_VERSION/arch
* document what's there, answering questions like
- where can I find latest binary pkgs for NetBSD/i386 4.0
- where can I find latest binary pkgs for Solaris 9/x86
- where can I find (any) binaries from pkgsrc-2007Q2
* nuke/"archive" old binary pkgs
* establish and document the policy for this
Suggested place for that documentation: Near
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/ftp-layout.html (which currently
doesn't have a lot of useful information)
Anyone up for that job? :)
- Hubert